Wednesday, 9 September 2009

This has been kindly supplied to me by P, he saw it on some CNN finance pageshe was reading and thought it was funny so passed it on.

It is funny, too; according to an article by Yan Q Mui in the Washington Post there is serious economic research which relates likelihood of economic recovery to the sales of men's underpants, that's a new one on the sales of lipstick and women's skirt length and underwear which I've read about before.

But the best one in the (unusual) Economic Indicator charts is the Hot Waitress index, yes its true I couldn't possibly make this up, and these kind of things are read by economists, no wonder the western world economy almost collapsed. Anyway apparently “The hotter the waitresses, the weaker the economy. In flush times, there is a robust market for hotness. Selling everything from condos to premium vodka is enhanced by proximity to pretty young people (of both sexes) …. That leaves more punishing work, like waiting tables, to those with less striking genetic gifts. But not anymore. A waitress at one Lower East Side club described to me what happened there: ‘They slowly let the boys go, then the less attractive girls, and then these hot girls appeared out of nowhere. All in the hope of bringing in more business.'' Hence their conclusion that the hotter the girls the weaker the economy.

I wondered if a Hot Spanking Index might have any bearing on world economic recovery, I mean maybe the severity of the average spanking might reflect on the mood or emotional condition of the deliverer - and receiver - of the spanking and maybe that could be an indicator of good or bad times to come. At least for the spankee if not for the world economy.

I recommend enlisting a few hundred spankos and administering spankings to each and every one of them regularly for a period of ten years. Correlate spanking % economic data and Hey Presto, all will be revealed!

Lessee now, for 500 participants we'll need at least three spankers, "dealing with" a fresh participant every 20 minutes, which means each spanker will "deal with" three spankos an hour, 25 spankos in an eight-hour day, one hundred and fifty spankos in a six-day week. With such a heavy schedule, we'll have to troll for grants. Rockefeller Foundation, maybe? Logistics, logistics...